Many types of devices can be used to access and display video content for viewing, such as with computer devices, smart televisions, entertainment devices, and mobile devices, such as tablets and mobile phones. Typically, a user with a device can access any number of Web sites, such as news, sports, advertisement, product manufacturers, and any other sites that include downloadable video content. For example, a user may navigate to a news site and watch a video of a news clip, navigate to a sports site and watch a highlight video, and then visit a car manufacturer and watch a new car video. Any of these video content providers may want to know not only which videos are being requested by viewers, but also how much of a video is being watched. For example, the car manufacturer may want to know whether viewers typically watch the new car video all the way through to the end, or stop watching at some point earlier in the video.
A technique that is utilized to collect video playback data is commonly referred to as “heartbeat” data collection, which is used to collect the video playback data at periodic intervals of time while a video is displayed for viewing through a Web browser application using a flash plug-in, HTML5 video tag, or a standalone video player on a device. The video playback data collection at periodic intervals can be used during a video session to mark the progression of video playback at a device. For example, the collected data may be communicated from a device back to a video content provider every five seconds, or after playback of every twenty-five percent segment of a video. The heartbeat data collection is also used because there is currently not a reliable technique that works across the many different types of devices to detect the end of a video session and then send the collected data from a device back to a video content provider. For example, the collected data may indicate that a viewer watched a video up to at least the beginning of the last segment (e.g., past the seventy-five percent point) of the video, but will not indicate how much of the last segment of the video the viewer watched if the video is stopped before playback is completed.
The heartbeat data collection approach is prone to this type of data loss, such as when a large amount of video playback data is collected over a long data collection interval, and then the data is not sent to the video content provider when a video session at the user device is suddenly ended. The heartbeat data collection approach also uses processing and bandwidth resources to accomplish the repeated server calls for a single video to communicate the collected data back to the video content provider. The periodic data collection intervals are also a user device configurable value, which leads to varying accuracy levels for collected data across different video content publisher sites, and this can result in analytics data that is unusable for any comparative study reports across publishers.